


Failure Is Not Fatal

by TheTripBeginsWithAKiss (geekyred)



Series: Duty Bound [4]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Anal Sex, F/M, Light Dom/sub, Oral Sex, Spanking, Teasing, cross dressing, lots and lots of teasing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-07
Updated: 2013-11-12
Packaged: 2017-12-07 19:20:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/752092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/geekyred/pseuds/TheTripBeginsWithAKiss





	1. Chapter 1

Bond doesn’t think about that night too often. He wants to. He’d like to invoke it and all others he’s experienced with Barbara Mawdsley more than he does. But that would be stupid. He can’t indulge himself like that. He knows it would lead to creeping changes in how he approaches M, his work and everything else. It’s not difficult for him to imagine careless indulgent glances around the wrong people, half thought-out conversations in the wrong place and memories and wishes pushing their way to the front of his mind at the wrong time. Very possibly deadly. At the very least M would kill him if he ever put a foot out of place.

So he locks it up for most of his waking hours. But not tonight. Tonight, for now at least, he’s alone and in his apartment his thoughts are free to be his own. So when the memory of her wicked smile as she told him _‘I hardly think you’ll last long enough to make it worth my while’_ floats to mind he lets it stay. Or the way the woman wasn’t the least bit abashed when he pulled her onto his lap and tossed the towel - the only thing she was wearing by then - to the floor, he keeps that one at the forefront of his thoughts too. He certainly can’t help a self-indulgent, half embarrassed grin as he remembers how they’d fucked on his couch and he’d almost proved her right.

He’s sitting on his sofa now half-heartedly leafing through the copy of _Le Monde_ that he picked up in the Gare du Nord as he was waiting for the Eurostar to take him back to London. There’s nothing terribly interesting in it. Just the usual arsey politics and panicky economics but not a word about the other stuff. As it should be.   No-one who doesn’t already know needs to learn anything about the goings on of European security or what has and hasn’t been agreed and signed.

Bond takes a sip of his coffee and turns the page. He really doesn’t like French, he finds it a bit dull as languages go and to him the notion that it’s the one that speaks to love is risible. He folds the paper and leaves it on his coffee table. Reading it is a pointless sham. He’s not passing idle time unwinding at the end of the day or brushing up on his French reading skills.

He’s waiting.

He’s killing time.

He’s on fucking tenterhooks waiting for a bloody woman.

There’s no guarantee that she’ll turn up at all. If the Prime Minister holds M and the Foreign Secretary in talks for too long, well, it’s been a long enough day already and sleep can be a valuable commodity. Bond was at St Pancras Station for the 0540 to Paris and when he boarded the carriage M was already there with Tanner. Now it’s a little before nine in the evening and Bond counts himself lucky he’s already home.

He knows he’s lucky for a whole lot more than that.

He’d be an idiot if he thought he deserved her or that he was entitled to everything that she gives up to him. He’s not that kind of fool. It’s a privilege and he’s smart enough to show it some fear. Christ almighty there’s not much else he could do. She’s stunning, absolutely stunning in her acquiescence. It dries his throat and soars his pulse. It makes him desperate for her and that will never do. He promised her he would be better than the rest. So he sits on his sofa staring at a newspaper he can’t be bothered to read and thinks about all the ways he can be.

It’s an hour more before M uses the key he gave her to open the front door and by the time she makes her way down his hallway Bond knows he has no choice other than to be worthy of the woman standing in front of him.

“How was the PM?”

“Talkative.”

He nods his head to the space beside him on the couch. “Sit down.”

M takes her seat then pulls Bond’s door key from her pocket. “Thank-you for the invitation.” She says and offers it back to him.

“Keep it.” He holds his voice flat and steady and stripped bare of desire but he’s still asking a question not giving an order. Not yet.

M hesitates, holding the key with a sort of delicacy and thinks about slipping it back into her raincoat. God knows she’d like to. It could be so easy to stuff it back in her pocket and give in completely. It could be but it isn’t of course. Except when he makes it so.

Bond gently clasps his right hand around her wrist then picks the metal from her fingers with his left and places the key on the coffee table.

“If you can’t say yes then the answer has to be no.” He says softly. “You know that.”

He’s still holding her wrist. Bond always has wonderfully warm hands. M likes them, she’ll admit that much. She can feel his scarred finger tips against her veins and the calluses on his palms prickle against her skin. She knows they’re not all from the job. She’s learned that he likes working with his hands. Honest work, apparently. His kitchen table, a vintage car he keeps tucked away somewhere, the hardwood flooring through his flat; they’ve all benefited from Bond’s touch.

Bond shifts and leans over, pulling M’s wrist towards his mouth and kisses her just above his grip. He can feel the thrum, the throb of her pulse quicken just enough to please him. “What about the other words? Can you say them?” He bites the soft fleshy ball of her hand, mindful of her thinner skin, but still leaves M marked with his teeth and kisses her wrist again. “Say them.” He flicks his eyes to her face to watch her speak.

“Sir.” She says with a trace of a smile on her lips.

He shakes his head slowly and moves himself completely around. He’s kneeling in front of her, clasping his hands around each of her narrow wrists and pushing them into the sofa. At a full stretch of his body he taps his lips at her mouth and takes his time drawing a kiss from her as he speaks. “Not that one, you teasing bitch, the other two.” He says and echoes the turn of her lips in his own faint smile.

He relaxes his grip on her wrists but M doesn’t want to move her hands from her sides as Bond starts to dance his fingers up her thighs, over the light material of her long, loose skirt.

“Bond.” She says as his fingers find the bump of the fasteners on her stockings. “Commander.” Every word forces her heart to beat a little faster. “James.” She feels so terribly light, as though she could float away if he wasn’t there to hold her down. “Bond.”

She’s rewarded for her words with another kiss but he moves his mouth lower and nips at her through her clothes enough to make her stiffen. “That’s for teasing.” He explains then quickly pinches her nipple with a fast hand that replaces his mouth and tightens his fingers until he can see the first delight of pain turning on M’s face. “And that’s for using more words than you needed to. I only asked for two.”

His hands go again to her thighs, but underneath the skirt this time, and back to the stocking tops. “I like these.” 

“Well I’m glad you do.” She says.

“You don’t?” He’s inching her skirt up slowly, rolling it back exposing silk and skin.

M’s already fighting to keep her breath steady. Why does he have to be so bloody good with his hands? “Maybe back in the fifties but not now.”

He sits back on his haunches then leans in, parting M’s thighs just enough to let him kiss a trail across the inside of one. “If you start going on about being too old again,” he says, although his words are mumbled against her skin, “I’m going to change my plans for tonight.” He rests his chin against her and looks up.  “Is that what you want?”

“No.”

“Good.” His thumbs are stroking back and forth just underneath the trim of her knickers. “Now I need to know you can say one more word.”

When she leans forward and whispers it to him Bond feels like he might just have had the world laid out before him for the taking.

He straightens up, takes his hands away from her and gets to his feet.

“Come on,” He says, “you’ve never seen my bedroom have you?”


	2. Chapter 2

She’d like to say it’s all very him, that his bedroom is a perfect study of the sort of masculine luxury that Bond seems to specialise in. It is of course but who could she tell. The same wooden floors that grace the rest of his Chelsea apartment dress the floor in here. She doesn't doubt that a small fortune in tailored suits and Bond's style of smart yet casual separates are hidden from view by the hand tooled carpentry that fits perfectly across one wall. With the rest of the sparse but carefully collated pieces of furniture in the room it’s the living beyond an agent’s salary that could have a man put under surveillance or in a box if his boss didn’t know better. Yes it’s all very him but the walls are painted the same quiet, dark stone colour as the ones in M’s own bedroom and she’s not about to read too much in to that except to say that they share similar tastes and that much she already knows.

“Mouse’s Back.” She says absently as Bond is pulling down the zipper on the side of her skirt.

His concentration has been wholly focused on M and undressing her slowly as she stands there for him. The top she was wearing is already on the floor and he’s enjoying the view and working on the rest. Then the odd words she’s spoken register and he looks up at her from his seat on the edge of the bed. “Hmm?”

“The walls.” She says as her skirt flops at her feet. Bond’s smoothing his hands across the girdle he’d asked her to wear, his toughened skin catching a little against the fabric. “The colour - Farrow and Ball, Mouse’s Back.”

“Hmm.” He says again, this time in agreement rather than confusion. “Good eye.”

“It’s on my walls.” She tells him. “In my bedroom.”

“Well now,” He looks up at her again and smiles. “I wouldn’t know about that.". Of the times, and he admits there have been several in the past even a few in his darker, needier moments that M wasn't present for, that he's ever so carefully made his way in to her home never, not once did he allow himself to visit her bedroom.

M runs a delicate hand through the short scruff of his hair. “We may have to change that one of these days.”

He savours her hand on him and the thought of any sort of future with her and his smile broadens. “That would be nice.” He pulls back, taking his hands away from her for the first time since his imposed striptease.

She’d dressed for him. Not the stuff on the outside, that was all business and presentable authority but underneath…underneath it’s for him. It makes his cock pulse just as much now as it did when he saw her on the train this morning. He knows she took her time, did as she was told and laid everything he provided for her out on her bed. She would have been careful too, wearing gloves to pull on the stockings she’d rather not wear, knowing he wouldn’t approve of snags on the tan silk.

She had to admit it all felt good. The bra he’d chosen for her had some substance to it, thank god, and the matched knickers echoed the same old-fashioned aesthetic. The girdle, Christ, she didn’t think she missed it as a piece of underwear but there’s something in it; maybe her age, maybe because he wants her in it and it holds her tightly when he cant, but she likes it. The long line nipped in her waist, smoothed her stomach and although it was a bugger to get on alone, it made everything she put over it sit a little bit better.

When Bond looks at her now it’s as though he can see the careful, purposeful dressing game she played out for him and the light from his eyes trickles over her like water. She can feel it on her skin as real as any touch. It almost tickles.

“Enjoying yourself?”

He nods. “Uhhu.”

He leans over to his bedside cabinet, a round sleek Scandi thing, and from the top drawer he takes a pair of scissors. They’ve the rounded tips that would be found in hospitals and first aid kits and they’re perfect for cutting through the sides of the knickers M’s wearing. He shimmies the remnants of what were a pair of turquoise and black lace briefs out from underneath the girdle before they end up on the floor.

“Much better. Now,” he says as he sits straight and still and is very careful not to give to the temptation to touch her even though the crescent of the girdle is a perfect frame for her naked cunt. “Tell me what you want.”

Her mouth opens but she finds it hard to say the words. She knows what she wants and she’s certainly asked for it before just not from him. He’s never made her ask. There were others in her life she’s said it to: occasionally for business though usually for pleasure but mostly and for a very long time it was only ever her husband. 

“You know what I want.” She says softly to Bond.

“Then let’s pretend I’m not a mind reader.” He shuts his eyes. “Say it.”

M wants to damn him to hell for being so sure of her when she can barely be sure of herself. How dare he be this man for her. How fucking dare he.

“I want you to spank me.”

Right then, hearing the words that would be…have been a worthless flirtation coming from anyone else but her Bond’s certain that Barbara Mawdsley is the most outstanding thing in his life and he’s fucked if he knows what he’s done to warrant her in it. Better to be lucky than good, he supposes.  He opens his eyes and pats his lap. “Here.”

She's tenative taking her place. She’s never been over his knee and he’s never spanked her quite like this. The smack of his hand on her arse is there to bring a prickling tickling heat rather than a bite or a sting. The force he normally delivers so well is absent. This is almost soporific. His hand paddles against her backside time after time til her skin blushed deep pink and maddeningly tender; a ceaseless, easy rhythm that Bond kepts going for god only knows how long til M is on the brink of something she doesn't know how to name. Then the smacks trail away to a caress. His free hand nestles in the small of her back and presses down with a silent instruction not to move.

Bond smiles at the light gasp from her when he draws a single finger down across M's wet cunt then pushes it gently into her arse.

"LIke that?"

"Yes."

"And more?

"Yes."

"I might have known." He says with a smile.

Then M gasps again as he pulls out and slips the finger under the fastener of her bra.

Like the the smug clever womanising bastard he's known to be Bond flicks his thumb and the first hook on M's bra comes away from the eye and the second, with only a little more effort, gives itself up to him not long after. M lays as still as she can, fire burning inside her, as he takes the same sure fingers to the fasteners on her stocking and the row of biting teeth on the girdle that gave her problems just that morning.

When he’s rolled the stockings off her legs and shimmied her underwear away from her skin and onto the floor he helps her to sit up on the bed and pulls a greedy kiss from her.

“I thought,” he starts a meandering trail of softer kisses across her neck and collarbone, “that I might tie you up.”


	3. Chapter 3

He’s tied her up before but it was usually an ad hoc thing.  His tie, her stockings, a shirt and once, just once, when they met up at a discrete hotel off the A23, he took the leather belt from his jeans and tightened it around her neck.  He’d held the free end like a leash as she knelt down and before she took his cock in her mouth M had lightly kissed the tips of his fingers, his palms and Bond had been in fucking heaven.

He might be there again now.

He’s already wrapped white rope around M’s wrists, tying knots and looping the twill around her forearms in gauntlets he thinks are just tight enough to leave the imprint of the cord on her skin.  He'd pushed her down onto the mattress and then, and then he'd taken as much time stripping off his own clothes as he had taking off M’s.  He liked the way she watched him, her eyes following his fingers as he unbuttoned his shirt and unzipped his trousers and eventually laid himself completely bare for her.

Now she's making the noises that belong to him - little gasps and breaths that M wouldn’t share with anyone else – and his cock is buried in her arse.  Jesus, she sounds like she’s enjoying it more than he is and he’s fucking loving it.

He nuzzles his face against her neck and breaths deeply as he kisses the curve.  She smells of a faded, lightly spiced citrus perfume he can’t put a name to and she tastes like heat.  God help him but he growls against her skin and it sends a shiver, a gentle nudge against every nerve, along M’s spine. Her back pulls against him in arch and Bond pushes harder, sinking himself deeper inside the tight little hole that a bottle of something slippy and M's willingness have made all too welcoming.

“I think you might be enjoying this.”  He whispers with a smile and a soft flick of his hips and he’s rewarded with a delicious throaty gasp from her.  “Is that a yes Mawdsley?”  He winds his hand across her body letting his fingers wander over her stomach in a lazy upwards scroll before he skims perfect feathery touches over the swell of her tits and brushes her nipples with his thumb. “Well?”

His hand is at her throat to feel her answer: a perfect quiet ‘yes sir’ that his splayed fingers can feel fluttering beneath them.

That’s all it takes.  He was never going to last long anyway, not like this.  It’s good. It's far too good.  He’s not delicate when he pushes her on to her front, pulling her hands above her head, and presses his body down on top of her.

M groans, swearing a broad curse into the bedding.  Bond, he’s impossibly hard inside her and it hurts - just a bit, just enough.  She swears again as he starts to fuck her with a tantalising force.  He’s calling her names and whispering obscene desires and filthy, delicious demands against her skin -

_(she’s his dirty bitch, his whore, his perfect fucking girl and he’s going to send her home aching and full of his cum at the end of the night and she likes when he fucks her arse  doesn’t she, doesn’t she, the filthy little tart)_

\- and she can barely think anymore. Hell, she doesn’t want to.  Let him take it all.  He can have every thought in her head and every inch of her body.  Let him take her heart if he wants it.

 _Oh God._ She’s not supposed to come. Not yet at least.  She’s been told. But Bond’s warm breath is on her skin, his dirty words are in her ear and the weight of his body is pinning her down.  Every heavy thrust he drives into her eager arse rolls her hips on the bed and she’s getting far too close to letting go.

“Don’t you dare.”  He says and loves the whine of disappoint that M makes.  He doesn’t want her to come, but he’s got a fierce need of his own he’s not going to deny.  He pulls her up onto her knees.  Now he’s the one to swear.  His hands are on her hips, gripping hard as he drives in to her as deep as he can.  Jesus Christ he feels like he’s ready to die.  His heart is pounding.  He’s sweating.  He needs to come.   “Me first.”  He tells her then fucks her with a crueller vigour until his muscles are taut and stretched and he holds himself there, just there, until he can’t anymore.

He loves it when she makes him come.

He’s panting as he sinks down across M, well spent and with a dozen dangerous thoughts creeping in to his mind.  All the girls he’s wasted time on, the disposable ones with the swollen curves and the gym toned hardness, they’ve never felt more meaningless. It doesn’t matter that M’s body sometimes demands a leniency that younger flesh rarely asks for.  It doesn’t matter at all.

She’s everything he needs.

She’s perfect.

And tonight she didn't ask for leniency, she asked for more.

“Turn around.”

M gets on her back with a wince that Bond finds satisfying.

“Alright?”

She nods.  She aches in wanton places and her body is gloriously teetering on the edge of something explosive.  She's more than alright but there’s still not a name she can give it, not yet. “Uhhu.”  The she smiles.  “Did you enjoy that?”

He answers with a lazy murmur and a lightly kissed thank-you, skimming his hand along her outstretched arm and tangles his thick fingers in the ladder of knots between M’s wrists. He could, he thinks, keep her dancing around the edge like this for a good while yet but their lives have compromises.  She’s been awake now for what he guesses are too many hours and she’s still not in her own bed.  These things need to be considered. He thinks of making her come and sending her home, drowsy, boneless and ready for bed and smiles.

She can feel his grin against her skin as he kisses her; slow, meandering, devilishly hungry nibbles across her collar bone and he begins to trace the path his fingers took, but this time with his tongue and the ache he’s caused and abandoned in her starts to roar again.  Then his mouth is on her cunt with the flat lick that he knows she loves and Bond has to lay his hand across her stomach to hold her still.

Christ almighty, the things that man can do with his mouth. He's got a damn cheek to ever be so good.

She rubs her hands across his head as Bond takes his time licking and sucking and lapping at her pussy.    Surely he’s got to wonder how such delicate fingers can grasp so firmly.  The rope he used to bind her, the knots he took a class to learn how to make, they’re scraping at his crown so he pushes his mouth harder against her and revels in the grip of her hands and the glorious, absolutely fucking glorious sounds that M makes when she’s about to come.

He’s going to make her scream when M's blackberry starts ringing.  It's a cold shower, a safe word and a full stop rolled in to one.

He's quick to grab the scissors and slice cautiously through the rope he took so much care to tie.  He was right about the branding it would leave behind but he resists the urge to kiss the dimpled skin. By the time he fetches her phone back to her M has thrown on Bond's shirt and the sleeves that are too long for her frame are covering up the proof of his delicate work.

"Ready?" He asks, all business when it’s the last thing on his mind. He wants to bury his face between her thighs and hear her come with his name on her lips. He wants to curl himself around her and let her sleep in his arms. But there’s no time now for sex or sentiment. There’s only time for work and duty and serving the crown.

Dear God, she’s better at than he could ever dare to be.

M nods.  She knows she’ll have to answer the phone.  The damn thing only rings out loud when she absolutely has to answer it.  Sometimes it's simple and the call comes and goes with a few words of assent and command to her chief of staff or it’s a push along to the foreign secretary for a rubber stamp. Then she can imagine Bond creeping back to bed beside her.

But not today.

Bond is already heading to the shower. He can see it’s serious from the look on M's face and whatever his boss has to say to Tanner isn't necessarily for his ears.  He knows his place.  Just about.

She’s listening carefully on the phone as Bond is walking away. It’s work now and that’s more important that her and more important than him and far more important than the two of them together. 

She had some unofficial words with a few European colleagues about a delicate matter while she was in Paris but she hadn’t reckoned on getting any intelligence back so quickly. Professionally she’ll have some favours to remember, that’s for sure. Personally, she wishes they’d all done bugger all for a few hours more. She needs to sleep.

At least it's not bad news and the leads Tanner’s telling her about seem solid. But there are two strands and only one agent with the right service chops in the local area and the woman, good though she is, can’t be in two places at once. She’s sending her after the lead that’s time critical. The other, well there’s a lad that’s a strong contender for the next double oh who should be good for the job but she wants to give him some back up.

“Get 007 out there,” she tells Tanner, “as soon as you can.” Then it’s a few one word answers. Yes, she’ll be coming in to HQ. No, don’t send a car to fetch her. When it’s all done and dusted she puts the phone down and flicks her eyes to Bond walking back in with damp skin and towel around his waist. Impeccable timing.

“Everything alright?”

“Just about. You need to get dressed. You’re due a call from Bill.”

“Going out am I?”

She nods. “Station T.”

“Yes ma’am.” He starts picking out pieces from his wardrobe; the suit, the shirt, the tie, then he looks back at her over his shoulder. “I’ve left the water on.” He says casually. But there’s nothing casual about it. There’s a bottle of M’s favourite shower cream in his bathroom, something that fills the air of his flat with orange blossom and cedar wood (and isn’t what she’s wearing today, he knows that much) and a robe certainly not sized to fit Bond hanging on the heated rail. Then there’s the temperature of the water. Jesus don’t ever let him get that wrong again, that woman’s got a foul mouth on her when-

“Warm?”

Bond smiles. “Of course.”   The blue streak M swore the last time he left the water on at the sort of temperature he prefers - that was almost enough to make a sailor blush. “What’s the job?”

“There’s a couple of leads on the hard drive. I want you to support Ronson on one of them.”

He ditches his towel and starts to get dressed.

“Tanner will give you the details.” M says as she’s walking across the room. There’s no place now for the luxury of the pain and pleasure Bond’s given her tonight and she certainly can’t spare any time to cast an eye over her naked agent but she’ll make the time for that shower. Just a touch below too hot, Jo Malone and a robe from an ancient little shop in London - she doesn't allow herself to spend much time thinking about how well Bond knows such mundane details of her life. Then something catches her eye - black and burnished gold - not normally Bond’s choice of underwear. “Weren’t those mine a few months ago?”

Bond smiles as he’s fastening his trousers. Let her think of him with her lace knickers stretched across his arse when she’s whispering orders in his ear. Let her remember the night she left them here. Let her know that he can do this. He can worship at her feet and be her boy and still have her bow her head and bend to his will as her man. “Yes.” He tells her with a grin and he’s about to kiss her when his phone starts ringing. “Enjoy the shower. Lock up when you leave. And M?

“Yes James?”

“Keep the key.”

“Yes James.”

Of course she’ll keep the key.


End file.
